The Complete Short Stories Of Mark Twain

(Hardback)

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This is the only edition in hardcover of his complete shorter fiction. Twain is a superb yarn-spinner, and his inimitable wit, nimble plotting and unerring insight into human nature are on full display throughout this thoroughly entertaining volume. Mark Twain's famous novels, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (available in Everyman) have long been hailed as major masterpieces, but it is less well known that the father of American literature also made his mark as a master of the short story. This is the only edition in hardcover of his complete shorter fiction- sixty tales spanning a long career - many rollicking and uproarious, some sombre and even shocking. Included, of course, are such immortal classics as 'The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' (1865), a humorous piece set in Gold-Rush California, which helped establish the young author's reputation, and 'The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg' (1899), a satirical novella in which a self-righteously respectable American small town is exposed as a fraud.

Author Bio

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born in Missouri in 1835. He was a typesetter, a river-boat pilot on the Mississippi and a gold prospector before achieving enormous fame as a writer and public speaker. On his death in 1910 President William Howard Taft said of him- "Mark Twain gave pleasure - real intellectual enjoyment - to millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasure to millions yet to come... His humour was American, but he was nearly as much appreciated by Englishmen and people of other countries as by his own countrymen. He has made an enduring part of American literature."